NASA's Juno spacecraft hovered to the top clouds of Jupiter on Saturday at 5:51a.m., the closest in any other time.
Juno is just about 2,500 miles above the giant planet's swirling clouds. It is expected to conduct 35 flybys from Aug 27 to February 2018 with complete suite of science instruments to observe Jupiter.
"This is the first time we will be close to Jupiter since we entered orbit on July 4," said Scott Bolton, principal investigator of Juno from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio.
"Back then we turned all our instruments off to focus on the rocket burn to get Juno into orbit around Jupiter. We have checked Juno from stem to stern and back again. We still have more testing to do, but we are confident that everything is working great," he added.
"For this upcoming flyby Juno's eyes and ears, our science instruments, will all be open," he added.
All scientific data will be downlinked back to Earth for scientific interpretation.
"No other spacecraft has ever orbited Jupiter this closely, or over the poles in this fashion," said Steve Levin, Juno project scientist from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
"This is our first opportunity and there are bound to be surprises. We need to take our time to make sure our conclusions are correct," he added.
The spacecraft's light imager called JunoCam will be taking high resolution pictures to give humanity the first few glimpses of the planet's north and south poles.
